Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver conceded yesterday that the multibillion-dollar “millionaires tax” on those making $200,000 and up — which is overwhelmingly favored by his fellow Democrats — is dead.

Silver, the Legislature’s most powerful Democrat, told The Post, “I am realistic and I am practical. The governor is not for the tax, the [GOP-controlled] Senate is not for the tax.

“As a leader, that’s the conflict I have, since my members overwhelmingly support it. Will it happen? I don’t think so.”

Many legislative Democrats, seeking to block Gov. Cuomo’s efforts to cut spending to close a projected $10 billion deficit, have hoped the “millionaires tax” on high earners, which expires Dec. 31, would be renewed to raise more than $1 billion in the new fiscal year.

Even more importantly for many lawmakers, the tax would bring in $4 billion to $5 billion in the 2012 fiscal year, when they’re up for re-election and hoping to fund popular programs

Silver, meanwhile, said he’ll seek to change some of the costcutting recommendations outlined late last week by Cuomo’s Medicaid Redesign Team.

While the plan is backed by the state’s major hospital organizations and 1199 SEIU, the powerful health-care union, Silver said he was opposed to the cuts to “various communities, on human services” that would result.

Silver also opposed curtailing medical malpractice awards, which add hundreds of millions of dollars to medical costs annually, but insisted his position had nothing to do with his work for Weitz & Luxenberg, the huge personal-injury law firm.

“This is not about me. I don’t think there is in any way a conflict because Weitz & Luxenberg’s overwhelming business does not deal with medical-malpractice cases,” said Silver.

“I just believe people are entitled to their day in court,” added the speaker, a hero to the state’s trial lawyers because of his longstanding opposition to tort reforms.

Insiders, including some close to Silver, called Cuomo’s ability to gain support for Medicaid cuts from the hospital industry and the SEIU a game-changer that had stripped Assembly Democrats of two traditional allies.

A top Democratic strategist who knows the speaker well said, “Every year for over a decade, the hospitals and 1199 have sided with Silver against the governor, until now. This changes the entire dynamic.”

Brooklyn Democratic Sen. Kevin Parker, who has earned a reputation as a hothead, may soon earn one as an addlebrained fool, with a bizarre scheme to grow palm and other tropical trees and plants along the state Thruway.

Parker, convicted in December of assaulting a Post photographer, last week proposed a green “Thruway to Fuelway” initiative under which bio-fuel crops such as “palm oil, jatropha and mahua” would be grown along the now-snow-lined Thruway’s median strips.

Palm oil, of course, comes from the palm trees that are found in tropical landscapes and, at times, in the Bronx Botanical Gardens’ hothouses.

Jatropha is native to Mexico and Central America and is cultivated in tropical and subtropical regions of the world, while mahua is a tropical tree found in India.